Reunited

Because the container was due to arrive in Ashburton Friday morning at 9:00 AM, I already went there Thursday night to sleep “en famille”. That way I could spend the whole Friday on moving. For this one occasion not having a job came in pretty handy :-)

At 9:30 the container arrived on a big truck. Chained up the container was skilfully put on the ground. I was assigned to check the unloaded goods against the inventory list, to make sure everything had arrived in good order. All the items that the MAF wanted to check (our garden furniture, the Christmas decorations because they wanted to make sure there were no pine cones in there, a Chinese bamboo umbrella and a few Dutch Maggi stock blocks) were put aside. The MAF requires that this be put aside on a sheet of plastic or on a slab of concrete, so it won’t contaminate the environment. To comply, the movers first put all the boxes on the grass, and when the time came that the MAF was due to arrive they spread out a large sheet of plastic and moved the stuff over to the plastic :-/

After some time it became pretty clear that the NZ movers weren’t as good in stacking boxes as their Dutch colleagues are, because heavy boxes were stacked on top of fragile stuff without hesitation. They also stacked the boxes in a way that it was never going to fit in my father’s big enough garage. Seeing where this was heading my father started to interfere with the process. I’m glad he did, because after about three hours the job was done with everything fitting perfectly :-)

At 11:30 the MAF officer came to check out our suspect boxes. Everything was in good order, well-cleaned, no problem at all. He was very glad we only brought one box with Christmas decorations. He told us that American migrants usually take twenty bloody boxes of Christmas decorations with them… :-) He gave the movers a compliment that they really knew how to comply with the rules, everything placed on plastic and all. Yeah right… ;-)

I must say it was a strange experience to see our own belongings here in NZ. We have lived here without them for the last two months and we didn’t really miss them that much, actually. Our furniture doesn’t belong with my NZ experience; it belongs to my memories of NL. My brain had some difficulty flipping that switch. Nevertheless I am very happy to have our own computer, my guitar, the DVD/CD player and some extra clothes and books handy again. Emma is very happy to be reunited with her sandals and her own tailor-made pillow. The rest will remain in the garage for now, because to put it all into our one room in Christchurch would cram up the place, kinda… :-)